The Last Stormdancer

less—the Khan spread his wings, thirty feet of gleaming feathers and crackling current, and opened a beak sharp enough to bite the horizon in half. His roar shook the earth. Stilled the blind monkey-child in his frozen tracks.

At this point, our wide-eyed visitors from the lands below would usually speak with their jabber-tongues. Make the sounds of rutting hogs and expect us to understand—as if arashitora had a caring for the language of things crawled but newly down from the trees. They would kneel and draw their swords and make nonsense with their mouths until one of the bucks would blood them and send them on their way. Either that, or make it rain.

And here now, this boy. This blind one. Crawled up the mountainside with a tiny bird at his shoulder and a stick in his hand, twig-thin limbs all a-shivering. The bucks around me growled and tore the earth with their talons. Their rage plain for any with eyes to see. Interloper. Monkey-child. Prey. But looking down at this boy, this blind child of men, something inside me stirred. I say not for certain what it was. Curiosity, perhaps. The muddy stirrings of prescience?

And so, though it was far from my place to do so, I fixed to be the one to make him feel unwelcome. Tempers in the Skymeet had been running hot, roaring and crackling and bloody-red, and I thought it better my talons gift the boy a little bleeding than another’s fling him screaming from the mountainside.

I sprang down from my stone near the Khan’s left flank and bellowed. Wings spread in threat. Buffeting the snow about the boy into tumbling flurries. He did not flinch. Did not tremble, save for the cold. He did not fear. This took me aback. Made me look small in front of my kin. Set my hackles to rippling.

And so I sought to teach him what fear was.

I stretched out with my talons, quick as hummingbird’s wings, intent on brushing foreclaw’s edge through his frost-pale skin. Nothing too deep. Nothing to bring a killing. Just a hurting he would feel in place of hubris for the rest of his living days.

Yet the boy moved.

Quicker than hummingbird’s wings. Quicker than the kiss of blinding lightning to scorched earth. Quicker than I could blink, he stepped aside, and around, and tapped my hindparts with his walking stick. Just once. The sound of lacquered pine striking my haunches louder than thunder.

Swack!

A moment of stillness. Glances among my packmates, incredulous. Grim amusement rippling amongst the Skymeet, gleaming in scores of amber eyes. Sudden rage swelling in my breast, blinding and red, settling me now not for the scarring, no, but for the teaching—to drag this monkey-child up into the sky, and see if his arrogance would gift him wings enough to hold him aloft. Blind or no. Boy or no. I would be his ending, true.

My roar shook the very stones, reverberating across the mountainside. A roar to begin avalanches, to send boulders of ice crumbling free and crashing into the canyons below, all Four Sisters trembling with the fury of it. And I raised my talons, set to seize and tear and shake like a doll of rags and bones and bloody—

Please stop.

A voice in the back of my mind. Gentle as spring wind’s kiss upon newborn buds. Never had I heard the like in all my life.

I mean no offense, great one. Forgive me. Please.

I blinked. Shook my head. Talons ripping furrows through the ice at my feet. The boy stood before me, hand outstretched, head tilted still, frozen breath hanging in rolling white drifts between us. And in all of me, from the bottom of my belly to the tips of my wings, I knew—somehow knew—that the voice I heard in my mind was his.

YOU …

I looked to my Khan. My kin gathered on the rocks about me.

YOU YOKAI-KIN?

Murmurs and growls among the Skymeet, elders looking on the boy in wonderment. And he spoke then, this boychild, though his lips did not move. And amongst the tempest of my own thoughts, his were birdsong and beauty; a melody I had never heard, and yet knew as if by heart.

I speak to the minds of beasts, if that is your meaning. Though I claim no kinship with you or any other spirit-beast, great one. Of that honor, I am unworthy.

My eyes narrowed. Growl bubbling and bursting in my chest.

WHO ARE YOU?

I fear I do not yet know the answer to that question. But my mother’s people, the Kitsune clan, they call me by name of Jun.

He pulled aside the heavy cloth at his shoulder, revealing a simple scribble in the shape of a nine-tailed fox on his right arm. I am told you monkey-children put stock in the ink in your skin—I tell you now, his was none to speak of.

I looked to my Khan. Uncertain. Back to the boy, whose eyes stared at the ground beside my feet as if some secret were buried in the frost below us.

WHAT YOU WANT, MONKEY-CHILD?

Ah. Now that is a far easier question to answer, great one.

A smile lit his lips, just the beginnings, curling at the edges with a hint of what tasted like arrogance. He drummed his fingers upon the haft of his walking stick.

I want to save the world.

His lightless gaze roamed the faces of my brethren, each in turn, as if he could truly see.

I am hoping you will help me.

* * *

Three figures sat vigil over the Fifth Shogun of the Kazumitsu Dynasty. Three companions to keep the great Sataro-no-miya company in this, his final hour of life.

The first of course, was Death. Hovering beside the bed, dampening every faint exhalation, creeping through the old man’s veins with every beat of his struggling heart. Patient as glaciers. A pale smile on bloodless lips. Death knew it would be soon.

Oh, yes.

The second and third participants in the closing moments of Shogun Sataro’s life were his two sons, Tatsuya and Riku. The boys were twins, handsome as devils paired. Jaws you could break bricks on. Long dark hair swept back from widow’s peaks, ink-black and luxuriant. Bow-shaped lips and high cheekbones and bottomless eyes, skin the color of melting gold.

Though identical in seeming, the brothers shared temperaments disparate as dawning and dusk. Riku was known around court as the Bear—swift to anger, often irritable, armed with thin patience and no humor whatsoever. Tatsuya was called the Bull—stubborn, staunch, and if rumor was to be paid heed, prone to rutting with anything not nailed to the floor. And yet both twins were possessed of a regal bearing. Confidence and assurance. Nobility, born and bred.

Killers, also.

The terminal difficulties of their delivery into this world accounted for the absence of Sataro’s wife, Eri, from his bedside (why the Maker does not allow you to deliver your young in eggs baffles me, monkey-child). Lady Eri’s final exit during the entrance of her two bouncing baby boys also provided quandary that had plagued the ministers of Shogun Sataro’s court for twenty years. For in all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth following Lady Eri’s death, the midwives who delivered Tatsuya and Riku could not say, for sure and certain, which of the boys had arrived first. And since rulership of the Imperium was seen as a mandate handed down by the Maker God himself, no one in court dared name the true firstborn and risk the Maker’s wrath by choosing the wrong son.

As a result, Tatsuya and Riku were … wary in each other’s presence.

To say the Bull and the Bear disliked each other would be unkind. To say their father was reluctant to incur the Maker’s wrath by settling the matter of succession right before he shuffled off this mortal coil would be understatement. And to say either Tatsuya or Riku would be unwilling to murder his sibling in exchange for absolute rule of the Shogunate would be an outright lie.

Wary in each other’s presence, as I said.

I was not there, of course. The presence of a two-ton thunder tiger in the bedchambers of the Lord of the